Prayeras the Subject of Speech Activity and its Communicative Intension

The article reveals the phenomenon of prayer as a form of communication between individual and God. It is shown that prayer as a subject of speech activity is the leading form of religious discourse. Based on the analysis of the definitions and classifications of prayer in psychological and psycholinguistic studies, the author concluded that the communicative intention of prayer is highly variable and emphasized the significant heuristic potential of the psychodiagnostic method of prayer for revealing the individual characteristics of prayer appeals. It is noted mentioned in M. Poloma, N.M. Savelyuk, B. Spilka, R. Foster and other scholars research types of prayer ("prayer-request for yourself and others", "prayer-gratitude", "prayer-meditation", "prayer-ritual" etc.) form the basis for creating multi-tool psychological technique. Adapted Ukrainian version of A. Lukow’spsychodiagnostic questionnaire for investigating the communicative intentions of prayer showed high validity and reliability. The adaptation of the technique to the Ukrainian-language sample resulted in the transformation of its internal structure: unlike the six-factor English version of the original scale, seven subscales were identified in the presented method. The subscales of the questionnaire ("prayer as a confession", "prayer as a request for others", "prayer as gratitude", "prayer as a request for oneself", "prayer as a ritual", "prayer as a meditation" and "prayer as a habit") provide an opportunity to comprehensively reveal the place and role of prayer types in the religious communicative behavior of a person, to reveal the communicative intention of turning to God. The article presents the statements on all 25 items of the final version of the questionnaire, as well as the normative values for the subscales. It is emphasized that the adapted material of the technique can serve as material for psycholinguistic studies of religious discourse.